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does radio shack make it one stop shopping for the home made kits?

 
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It'll end up costing you around $50 to make one yourself...but yes, Radio Shack should carry all necessary parts.

 
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well i wouldn't use the radioshack power wire..go to any car audio store and ask them for 8 gauge ground/power wire....they should have it...and you can also choose the colour u want...around $1cdn/feet, u need about 10 feet....

 
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You guys measure in feet? wtf? I thought Canada used metric unit...

 
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^word up to metric!!! i'm an engineer...i talk in imperial and metric..haha...since this is an american site..i'll use imperial so no one comes and pm's me what 1 meter of wire in feet equals...haha...and besides, since most of the world uses american brand car audio stuff...all the measurements are in imperial from amp + sub dimensions to purchasing audio wire...

 
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i got some 4ga set screw ring terminals in the for sale forum right now 'cause i bought extra. these are very good for diy grounding kit.
here's the link

 
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For more discussion on diff grounding materials and methods (i.e., parallel circuit vs. central grounding point), search "Bridge Motorsport" here and in tech section. I got Bridge kit and noticed some improvement in auto shifting and less electrical static. Home made is prolly just as good if done right.

 
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OK well let me as the tech guys real quick Because I have been reading this for a bit. Now lets say you buy the 4 gauge wire from the audio shop. Now would it be better to spend the EXTRA money and buy GOLD connecters (the connecter that connets to the wire with the eye hole to put the screw thru to ground to the car) or will jsut any Copper one do. Now being a Best Buy Home theater tech guy I was always taught that the gold end were better due to the fact that it will transfer electricity much faster and is alot less restrictive. So if you can shed some insight I would grealty appreciate it.

 
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Maybe ppl with grounding kits have bad factory grounding? LIke it corroded etc through the weather and stuff and now it wasnt as effective. So once they put in a new grounding system they swear that they got improvments. But probably when they just got factory performance they lost due to wear. Same with spark plugs (their plugs were probably way overdue for a change or burnt to hell), Intake (Their stock filter was probably really dirty to begin with)

 
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acekicker: yes, gold is better, but u think it's gonna make that much of a difference? like for car audio, people are always saying that these wires are better, these connectors are better..but u know what? it won't make a difference cause of the road noise...a rca is an rca..., but for home theatre, that's different, there's no noise inside the house that can be louder than ur home theatre system....that's why for a home system, everybit matters, but for a car, it doesn't...

so in my opinion, ur just wasting ur money on gold connectors, just buy normal one's...

aznmikex215: yes, i can see sparkplugs and intake to be very true...but not for connectors... keep in mind that when the connectors were put in, the pieces haven't been corroded due to weather yet....the terminal ring for the factory connector and the chassis/tranny that it's touching is still corrode free...take a look, take off one of the connectors, u'll notice one side is all corroded, the other side is still copper/new looking...that's because that surface hasn't been exposed to the weather yet..so in conclusion, no, the factory ground wires does not make ur vehicle lose performance...

 
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Gt thanx man I apprecaite the info. Now what would be better to connect the wires all together like a big loop or to buy a distriburtor block type one?

 
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distro block...u want the power to go one way, if u connect it in a big circle, u'll have power flowing both directions, well it really doesn't matter, cause either way it'll end up back at the same point anyways (the battery) so it's really up to u..whatever looks nice i guess

 
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Gt, good info with your posts, but it might help ppl to use the water analogy for electrical stuff:

If you think of voltage as water, the more pipes it has to drain the faster it will drain and teh less stray voltage you'll have. It's not that the electricity is going both ways, its that if you connect stuff in series (i.e. connecting valve cover to alternator to vtec to whatever then finally going to the chassis / negative battery cable) you'll have one pipe / path for the water to go through. It'll still be going in one direction to 0 voltage to the neg cable / chassis.

Wiring to a distro block wires the circuit in parallel, which means that each source of nasty voltages (vtec sol, alternator, tranny, etc) gets its own separate pipe to the big distro block, and from there can go out in even bigger (i.e. lower gauge wire) pipes to the ground and neg battery cable.

It's not going to all end up at the same point, though. if the battery has a stronger reference ground in the form of a better neg cable -> chassis link, then the voltage it puts out will be better relative to the rest of the system. if the rest of the system is giving noise, some of it will be taken out of it by other (albeit very small) sinks such as atmosphere, static, whatever.

Gt is right in everything he says.. mines just a more technical view.

 
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i got most of it, except i am stil not sure about valve cover being a good ground point or not?... and is 8gauge really better than 4ga after the distro block?

for the hardware ppl... too bad i am too much into the software side

 
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should i remove the factory ground wire before installing the new ground wire?? or can i install the new wire on top of the factory wire?

 
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you mean is 4 really better than 8 after the distro block.

smaller gauge == thicker wire.

I dunno, I personally think it depends on the kind of conduit you are using, whether you are heatshrinking the connection ends, and what kind of prep you do on the grounding points. If you just crimp the ends and don't heatshrink / seal them, then use the 4 gauge because the conduit will quickly develop resistance at the ends. if you use good heatshrink, good set secrew conducting ends, etc, then you probably could get away with the 8 gauge.

I saw soeone try to use 2 gauge on it once.. looks really bad and there's no way it could have worked better than 4. Looked like he permanently had jumper cables attached in his eng bay.

 
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I'd remove the factory wire just for the heck of it and see if the contact ends are frayed / corroded. If you wire in series through the factory wire (i.e. your loop is on the block / alternator and connects to the chassis through the factory wire) then the factory wire will be the weak link in the chain, the bottleneck of small pipe if you will.

If you install a better wire on top of the factory wire (either in series or from a distro block) then it'd be like wiring that connection in parallel, the current will just follow the path of least resistance, which is your new cable, but you also have the extra pathway of the factory cable.
I'd personally take it out and test its resistance with a multimeter.

BTW to determine if the valve cover is a good grounding point (or anything for that matter) buy a multimeter from harbor freight or Orvac (if you live in fullerton, lol) or frys electronics or wherever, and set it to read volts. clip the black lead to the negative battery cable, then touch the red lead to the valve cover. is there a small voltage thats fluctuating? if there is, then it's probably a good ground point and a source of weird interference. You can test other points this way as well. In fact, if you set the meter to measure resistance, you can test the resistance of your stock ground cables. Damn, I should go find where my multimeter went and test the points for the info...

Hope that helps

 
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ok, so few more questions..
1. i am talking about the point after the distro block to the individual grounding points. I am using nothing less than gold-plated set screw ring terminals for them. gtracing said there is not enough "push" if i use 4ga wires, so he said use 8ga wires. I am trying to get another engineer's opinion on this. let me know which one.
2. did you test out if the valve cover is a good grounding point or not?
3. more resistant in cables = bad, right?

 
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Replace stock ground wires with 4 gauge wires. Done.

 
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reddawnman: u da man! i tried to keep it down to earth and easy for everyone to understand...but yea...what u said! haha

wonderz:
1)well think about it this way...like what reddawnman said, think as it all as pipelines....the smaller the pipe size, the higher the pressure, the bigger the pipe size, the lower the pressure....u wanna stay somewhere in between.....so if u go too big, there's not enough pressure to send the electrons through....if it's too small, it'll overheat (melt the wire)
2)valve cover is always a good grounding point...it's easy to put in, ur sparkplug wires are close to there (dunno if they ground there or not tho) but just take my word for it, ground it there...
3)yes, the lower the resistance the better...that's why car audio power wire is the best because it has low resistance...if u go with radioshack wiring, it has higher resistance...

gearbox: u can do that, but remember, electrons flow backwards from negative to positive....so if you really think about it, ur chassis is actually full of electrons, and to get power, all u do is tap into ur chassis and electrons will flow out into whatever ur powering...if u change ur oem wires to 4 gauge, ur still only powering ur entire car with 2 ground points....the more ground points, the better....did that make sense?

 
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i think gearbox has more than 2 ground points from what i read from his HVS DIY thing.
and about the pressure thing for negative.. so we want the highest "pressure" w/o melting the wire? thus = 8ga?

and can you explain to be in more technical terms what this pressure is? 'cause i don't think i learned it in my intro EE class.

 
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amps, that's pressure for electricity, or the amount of flow or some ****...i can't remember that much either, 2 years ago almost...only did it for one year..stopped cause i didn't really like 3 phase that much

 
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Right answer, wrong reason. The only reason you don't have really big ground wires is because you get diminishing returns once you get to a point. if you pour a glass of water down the drain, do you really need a 3 foot sewer pipe to catch it? In the water analogy, think like you have a bunch of water in a water tower a distance X off the ground. the water is current (amps) and the voltage is how high the tower is off the ground. The water pressure is resistance times how much current you have (Ohms law V = IR Power (watts) is P=IV) where I is current, V is the voltage, R is the resistance of the conductor.

Back to easy stuff, like water

So if you were trying to drain excess water as fast as possible from the water tower, you'd want the biggest diameter pipe possible (lowest resistance) and as little water as possible running through the drain (low amount of current). "Pressure" to send the electrons through is provided by the voltage differential between whatever point you start at (valve cover, alternator) and the "ground" which is kind of an ambiguous term, but basically means a point with no voltage relative to the system / battery. The bigger cable you have, the less resistive it will be and the fatter the pipe, meaning the voltage will drain better to the "real" ground of the negative battery.

Smaller cable is a small pipe, and combine that with a bunch of water flowing through it and, yeah, it heats up a lot. If you have ever shorted a 12V car battery with 20 gauge wire, the stuff melts pretty quick. Ideally you'd have like 00 gauge wire (REALLY big.. think like power line wire) connecting to the ground. However, this isn't practical and you get diminishing returns with each larger gauge after 4 Ga. wire (Some say even after 8 Ga). I mean, we don't have that powerful of voltage, nor do we have an assload of water coming in.

Wonderz can stop reading now, because at this point its gonna get really technical


OK, there seems to be a discrepancy here: Electrons flow from negative to positive, yes. Current flows from positive to negative. the + sign means that that pole of the battery is undergoing some sort of chemical reaction that makes the atoms positively charged, and pulls the chain of electrons from the wires and the negatively charged / ground part of the batery (- side) through to balance out the equation. It's called a Redox reaction in chemistry. The reason for the discrepancy? The people who discovered electricity were wrong... but it makes no difference as long as you use one convention consistently. When you solve a circuit in an electrical eng class, or problem, you can live in a current world or in an electron flow world, but you still get the right answer.

The electrons have to have some sort of incentive to move. that's provided by the redox reaction mentioned before that goes on in your battery, and the voltage is a constant 12 volts. if you really want to look at it from the electron's point of view. the # of ground points doesn't matter, only the resistance of the path the electrons have to take matters. So, 2 ground pts made of 4 ga wire do just fine, as the resistance int eh wires is really low. woudl you rather have 30 ground points of 20 Ga wire? didnt think so. thats like trying to water a city with 1/8 inch neoprene tubing, the flow just isnt there.

Damn, too much typing, but I'll be glad to talk more if someone REALLY cares to know whats going on...

Just think, I'm a musician who started out at UCSD as an electrical eng for 2 quarters of my 4+ years in college :-)

 
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wow, EE turned to musician...
i ditched hardware and went over to dark side (software) in my first year in UC Berkeley, lol but i still understood most of what you said.
I know i don't need 0/1 gauge, but is 8 gauge efficient or do i need 4 gauge?
and if # of grounding points don't matter, why we need to ground from lots of places?

glad to have knowledgeble ppl on the site.

 
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Grounding points from different places on the electrical system do matter, # of grounding points to the chassis is less important,b ut 2-3 would be good.

if you are a software engy, think of various grounds as global and local variables.

When you have an electrical system, each circuit has a point that has no voltage differential relative to anything: it's called a ground. So, in one loop from the battery, through the starter, through the radio, valve covers, plugs, alternator, etc. there can be many grounds, or places that the individual circuits believe have no "relative" voltage. Now, in the big scheme of things, all the circuits must loop together to one point that is a "big" ground, that really is as close to 0 electric potential as possible.

Each individual grounding point, if unconnected, would have its own idea of what ground was. for teh alternator it could be like .5 real volts (as measured from the battery / chassis) from the valve cover it could be 2 volts, from the stereo it could be designed wrong and leaking some of the audio wave into the power system and be totally out of whack, you get the point. We need some way to zap these reference grounds into a real 0 voltage state. We do that by connecting it to a big freaking cable going to a point which really IS at 0 electric potential, such as the chassis. We connect to the battery so that it absorbs current, acts as a noise absorber for that crappily wired stereo, and is a path of least resistance for any weird electrical spikes so it doesn't shock you to death everytime you touch the chassis. Connection to the chassis provides that much stronger "real" 0 volt ground for the battery to see.

I would personally use 4 Ga cables for the grounds fromt he distro block to the negative battery, from the battery to the chassis, and MAYBE the alternator to the chassis, keeping in mind that I live in san diego where thing corrode quickly and i want that extra conductivity. You probably can get by with the 4 ga from distro block to battery then from bat to chassis ground. Everythign else 12 or 8 ga jacketed/nicely insulated copper wire, with good set screw type connectors and heatshrink tubing.

 
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i just did some simple ones. 4g wire with copper crimp ons from:

-battery to stock ground location (left the stock on also)
-Battery to radiator support where the other stock ground is
-radiator support to engine block stock location (left stock on also)

i havent noticed any difference in anything!

 
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i guess this proves that our stock ground wires are thick enough that we don't need to upgrade it to 4ga.
what year's your car btw? notice any rusting in the stock ground points?

 
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OH MY GOD NOW I FEEL EVEN MORE DUMBER THEN WHEN I GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL MAN I SHOULD HAVE WENT TO COLLEGE INSTEAD OF JOINGING THE NAVY I FEEL LIKE A STUPID RETARD NOW. I TRIED READING ALL OF THESE POST BUT DAMN MY HEAD STARTED HURTING AFTER THE 2ND LINE HAHAHAHAHA.

Nah but i kinda got what yall were saying about. Can I try to make an analogy this is the only way I can relate things is about cars and tell me if I'm close is it kinda like a car exhaust. Since we have such small engine that dont push out that much power(amp) we dont need that big of exhaust pipes(flow for current) because if we go to big of an exhaust pipe if kinda does the opposite like the gases jsut sitting in the pipe not getting pushed out becaue not enough power to push out the exhaust. and You dont want to go to small because it will restrict(resistance) the gases from coming out so even still the engine will have to do more work to push out the exhaust. and since what we are wiring doesnt push out that much electricity to require the big flowing wire but it is still pushing more then to go with a small wire. is this kind right?

Ok here is it is easier

To big 3"(0-4ga) of exhaust pipe wont have enough gases push gases out fast enough
To small (12-20ga) of exhaust pipe wont be big enough to push gases out with a good flow?

Is this kinda right with my anology or do I jsut sound stupid and made myself look like an idiot even more?

 
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The analogy would work if electrons were hard to get moving. Electrons (unlike air) have no (ok, very little) mass, and are already moving at the speed of light. Also, electrons are in a chain, and hop from atom to atom... if the same thing happened in your exhaust pipe, the pipe would be like a closed tube of air, and the exhaust would leapfrog over the molecules and out the back, heh.

On another note, I think 4 Ga wire for grounds to the chassis and neg cable would be best. I mean, it costs like a buck a foot, it's not exactly an expensive mod.

Also, i stand corrected on the huge wire issue. As you get mostrous wires, they actually have internal resistance growing because of impurities in the cable, etc. So, probably 4 Ga wire for primary grounds and 8 or 12 ga for the wires from the various components is best.

 
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yea, that's right and more towards what gtracing's talking about.
i think what reddawnman's talking about is that, how fast the flow doesn't matter, we don't want a restricted flow of current. thus bigger the "pipe" the better it is, but you don't want an infinite big pipe 'cause there is no point because of diminishing return. so the general consensus is that 8ga with good connections or 4ga is probably good enough. definitely don't need to get 0/1 ga wires.